Ruthless Cosmopolitan

A conversation with Dr Ben Redder, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, about historical video games. Dr Redder is a video game historian, and undertakes research in the representation of the past through historical video games, specialising in late Medieval historical games based in Central Europe and East Asia. His doctoral thesis examined the representational medium of gameplay, and the different types of history and historical engagement gameplay offers through its multi-modal communication.His

A conversation with Dr Paul Scriven, RMIT University about the relevance of Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological framework for exploring how players can have empathic social experiences with NPCs. Dr Scriven focuses on the ways in which technology reconfigures how we relate to each other, and to the world we live in. Informed by the phenomenological tradition, in particular the philosopher Alfred Schütz, his topics of interest and expertise include mediated interaction in virtual video game worlds, the

Professor Nick Agar, University of Waikato.Favourite game: Secret Hitler. A conversation about AI and tertiary education.

Podcast introduction.

Humanure, or the fertilisation of food with human excreta, is an ancient agricultural technique that is still in use today. Climate change, population increases and water shortages are all reasons why we should reconsider how we think about pee and poo.WARNING: crude language in this episode!

The 2025 LA fires bred conspiracy theories. But why? We have a social and personal need for permanence - we want to bounce back 'like a rubber ball' after disasters. But complex systems (like cities) are resilient only because they adapt… …and we hate this contradiction. Mike Davis - The Case for Letting Malibu Burn